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Innovation: Google may know your desires before you do

Innovation is our regular column highlighting emerging technologies and predicting where they may lead

By Paul Marks

Google attempts to return relevant search results in the blink of an eye. But in future it could go one better, delivering search results to its users even before they know that they want the information.

Amit Singhal, one of Google’s veteran search algorithm engineers, wants to develop a search engine that second-guesses users’ needs well ahead of time.

“I call it searching without searching,” he said at a briefing at Google’s London headquarters yesterday.

In future, your Google account may be allowed, under some as-yet-unidentified privacy policy, to know a whole lot about your life and the lives of those close to you. It will know birthdays and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences, preferred hobbies and pastimes, even favourite foods. It will also know where you are, and be able to get in touch with your local stores via their websites.

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No more present panic

Singhal says that could make life a lot easier. For instance, he imagines his wife’s birthday is coming up. If he has signed up to the searching-without-searching algorithm (I’ll call it “SWS” for now), it sees the event on the horizon and alerts him – as a calendar function can now. But the software then reads his wife’s consumer preferences file and checks the real-time Twitter and Facebook feeds that Google now indexes for the latest buzz products that are likely to appeal to her.

“It might suggest I buy her an iPad and point me to some relevant product reviews,” he says. But SWS might also discover, again from fishing in recent social media, that the local gadget store has a three-week waiting list for iPads. “So it would bring forward its alert to give me time to order it.”

At other times, SWS could give its users a personalised and frequently updated news service by gathering information from social media sites. Singhal points out that Twitter can beat newscasters to warn you of events that might affect you&colon; an earthquake that hit San Francisco in January sent ripples through Twitter 10 minutes before a news alert from the US Geological Survey alerted the professional news media.

More mundanely, real-time updates could highlight a major traffic jam on the way to a meeting that’s marked in your calendar and warn you to delay your trip, or suggest the best alternative route.

Getting to know you

Singhal’s idea taps into a growing research trend that is exploring ways to personalise search. For instance, Yahoo Research in Barcelona, Spain, has demonstrated that basic demographic information can help to reduce the ambiguity of some search terms by weighting search results towards what a particular user is likely to want to know.

But while the technology exists, it won’t be brought to market until ways are be found to address the privacy concerns that highly personalised services will inevitably raise. Google knows this only too well&colon; privacy-sensitive internet users are still feeling stung by Google’s sniffing of private Wi-Fi addresses from its Street View cars.

“If searching-without-searching happens, it needs to be done in an incredibly privacy-preserving way, with full control by the users over what it knows,” Singhal says. “That’s going to take an awful lot of innovation.”

While Google reckons such a system could save a user up to 15 minutes of conventional searching every day, Singhal stresses that SWS is not a product in development, but a “dream” he has.

However, it’s worth noting that the other dreams he has had in his 10 years at the helm of Google’s algorithmic development include ever-smarter context-sensitive text search, translation engines and location-sensitive search – all of which have come true.